September 2007 archive
The Magic Piano
Isaac has been taking piano lessons and he keeps telling me that I need to remember that he isn’t very good anymore since he took the summer off. He hates practicing and it is a lot of work to make him. I almost wonder why I am paying someone to teach him piano so that I can do all the work of making him practice everyday.
Some days it is easier than others. When he has a song that he really loves to play, it is easy. Last year he learned “Once There Was a Snowman” and that was hard to get him to play anything else because he loved that song so much. Right now he is playing little simple songs and his main focus is on learning to read the notes on the staff. Just for fun, I thought I would let him see if he recognized any of the notes in his favorite song “Scripture Power” so I got it out and showed the music to him. He recognized lots of the notes and was thrilled when he played some of it recognizably. Now each time he passes the piano, he just has to sit down and play the part he knows.
It is so cool how the piano, once his nemesis, has now magically turned into his favorite thing!
Posted by Ily on September 30, 2007 | Filed under: Family News | 3 comments
Screwdriver?!?!?!?!
Today was a busy day. I exercised in the morning and then had to clean the house so that I could host a baby shower here for a friend. I figured I would shower after the bulk of the cleaning was done… this is the “why waste time with a shower now when I only have to get another later” philosophy.
I still reeked at 4:30 in the afternoon (but my house was clean) and I asked Isaac (a “mature” 7 year old with a good brain) to watch the younger ones so I could get a shower real quick before dinner. He agreed and I hopped in the shower. Mid rinsing off the soap, Isaac runs into the bathroom out of breath telling me I gotta come because “Reece is stuck in the 2nd step by the mattress and we tried the screwdriver, but we can’t get him out!” After thinking “SCREWDRIVER?!?!?!?!” and “there are no mattresses on the stairs… or are there?” I rushed out of the shower to save the baby.
Reece was actually stuck in the ladder of the bunk bed between the bottom mattress and the 2nd step. He has a new trick of climbing the ladder, putting his head and body through the ladder above the 2nd step and wiggling into the bed that way. I guess he was trying a different option this time. He was hysterical and crying and mad and Micah (age 3) of all people was trying to unscrew the step with a power screwdriver so they could get Reece’s head out. They tried pushing and pulling him out, but that didn’t work. Hence the screwdriver idea was born. Too much Bob the Builder? You be the judge. Luckily I was slippery and wet and all that soap on me helped Reece be a little more slippery so I was able to get him unstuck.
All Micah could say was “Mom you’re getting our floor all wet.”
Gee. Thanks.
Posted by Ily on September 26, 2007 | Filed under: Family News | 4 comments
Isaac Learns to Ride
Isaac’s best bud, Oliver, can ride a two wheeler. Isaac has been riding a two-wheeled scooter. He’s had a bike for a few years now, but hasn’t had a lot of enthusiasm to learn to ride it. Friday Ily and I convinced him to just coast down the driveway with his feet out to the sides. The deal was he only had to do it three times. He didn’t like it, but he did fine. Saturday we made him do it another three times. At the end he said, “This is getting kind of fun.” Today, Sunday, after being very good at church, and very patient while Mom and Dad enjoyed Sunday Afternoon Naps, he asked if he could try his bike out again. Sure, we said, and headed outside. He went down the driveway three times again, and then went again and again and again. After a while I told him to try putting his feet on the pedals for a bit while he was coasting, just to see what it feels like. He put his feet on the pedals, and then he just started pedaling down the street. I just stood and watched in shock for a bit, and then took off running when he disappeared around the corner. I didn’t have to go too far before he came back around with a huge grin on his face. “Can I ride to the park now?”
I feel like a successful father today.
Isaac mastered his two-wheeler today. Once he got started, he didn’t want to stop.
... See my Tabblo>
Tonight, the cool thing is that Isaac was able to ride around the park with Oliver. This skill has brought him some new independence because he can wander the whole park now without me (Ily). Wow, he must be a big kid now.
Ok, really the coolest part about him learning to ride was that we didn’t have to hurt our backs running along beside him leaning over to hold him up. He has great balance and all we had to do was get him to try it before he picked up on the whole bike riding process. Mind you, getting him to try was hard, but it didn’t require physical aches and pains!
Posted by Ily and Bryan on September 24, 2007 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment
More Missing Photos
I found some more missing photos from August and early September, so here they are.
Mom and the boys had some fun with shaving cream one day this summer. ... See my Tabblo>
Ily and Heather took Isaac, Micah, Reece, Oliver, and Sam to Blue Lake Park on August 22. They were disappointed that the kids weren’t allowed to swim in the lake, but they had a good time at the Sprayground.
The picture of Reece is from behind because that’s all Ily could get of him. He’s getting pretty fast.
... See my Tabblo>
The last two were taken by Ily while waiting for Isaac’s bus on the first day of school. That cold, calculating expression on Reece’s face is just too much. Despite his intense concentration, he did not attain the camera.
Posted by Bryan on September 16, 2007 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments
The Missing August Pictures
The last entry had many words. This one has all the pictures that should have gone with it. And few extras.
While napping the day before Isaac’s 7th birthday party, the yard dudes showed up to aerate and de-thatch our yard. Yes, I had told them to come, they just don’t specify which day they will show up and they only rake up the mess if you pay insane amounts of money, because it happens to be insane amounts of work. So I (Ily) was too tired and brain-dead to have the presence of mind to tell them to come back another day.
I woke up from my nap to this picture out the door. Since I was planning an outdoor party, I was feeling really stupid that I let the yard dudes do this. I was trying to think of ways to make lemons into lemonade, but really, how many variations of finding a needle in a haystack can you have? Also, the thatch may look like hay, but it is much dustier and dirtier, and smellier, and just as itchy. When telling Bryan this plan to try and make use of the thatch for the party, I misspoke and actually said “make lemons out of lemonade.” He heartily agreed that that is what I would be doing. ... See my Tabblo>
Isaac turned 7 this year. He and all his buddies are huge Star Wars fans, so he had a Star Wars party. He likes to play Lego Star Wars on the Game Cube, so Ily made a Lego cake, with Star Wars stuff on it.
... See my Tabblo>
We spent Saturday of Labor Day Weekend at Seaside, OR. The weather was amazing. No wind, sunny blue sky, and about 70 degrees outside. If you have never been to the Oregon coast, trust me, that is amazing weather. We weren’t the only ones to figure that out because Highway 26 was a solid line of cars driving out there. It kept moving pretty well though.
... See my Tabblo>
We dug deep to find some pictures of our office that were taken before the big redesign. Most of these were taken not long after we moved in to this house, back in 2003. The one with the LCD flatscreen monitor is from 2006, and you can see that it hasn’t changed much over the years.
You can see the old desk that had been moved 7 times and would wobble if you looked at it funny. The desk had lots of little shelves and place to put things, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but it ended up looking cluttered and messy most of the time.
You can barely see the mismatched shelves to the right of the couch, but they are there. Our book collection outgrew those shelves and so they looked very overcrowded and messy too. Add to that another desk (unfortunately a great place for me to make piles of stuff to attend to later… much later…) next to the shelves with one more computer for the boys on it and you get the basic picture. It got very messy and I wasn’t good at cleaning it up because so much had to be done to make it neat!
Lots of stuff got thrown in the office if there was no place for it so every corner was basically full. If nothing else, cleaning the room out to paint made me really have to decide what we really needed and what we didn’t. I got rid of a lot of books that we no longer needed. As well as lots of paper and other various broken computer parts and out dated hardware (do we still need a joystick for an Atari game when we don’t have an Atari?).
It was glorious to have the room empty for a bit and start fresh with matching furniture.
... See my Tabblo>
Posted by Bryan on September 10, 2007 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment
August sure went out with a bang
Well, this month we did a lot. We came home from vacation to be sick for a week and because I am completely nuts, i felt like I had to make up for that lost week when we were sick and do tons of stuff during the remainder of the summer. Let me preface this entry by saying that I am crazy.
I have this amazing friend Shannon who I wanted to visit and she lives out in St. Helens, OR. So we set up a date to get together and decided we would meet at her house this time and then go to a park. It took me about an hour to get there in the morning and it was a beautiful drive. Kinda slow, but still beautiful once you got out of the Portland traffic. I have to admit, I wanted to go see her home this time (last time she came out to my home) because she is a fabulous decorator and I wanted to see just how this supermom worked. She has 3 super cute kids and she is busy doing stuff with them as well as scrap booking like a mad woman and she blogs almost every day (quality posts even!) and she put together a really great reunion website for our ward from freshman year at BYU and keeps updating that frequently and I secretly thought she had a team of elves running around helping her get everything done! It turns out she is normal… no big shock, elves don’t really exist… and just really organized! It was a great visit. We played at a park and our kids played wonderfully together. I introduced her boys to the joy (pain in the butt really) of Star Wars light saber play. I think she might never forgive me for that. The drive home was not so nice because of Portland traffic, but we made it home without anyone spontaneously combusting. Isaac did keep asking me to make Reece quiet so he could hear his movie, but he just had to live with the singing and sometimes squawking toddler on the now 2+ hour drive home.
After touring the huge metropolis of St. Helens (population 10,000?) I decided that I really like the amenities of my suburban life in Vancouver, but I am glad she is happy there. Really all that matters about a place is whether they have a Burgerville or not. St. Helens has a Burgerville. I could live there if I needed to. Did I mention Walla Walla sweet onion rings are in season?... Burgerville Walla Walla cheeseburgers are a big reason to love August here!
Marching along in August we did a bunch of other stuff like going to Blue Lake park in Oregon (not my favorite park because they won’t let kids under 5 swim in the lake therefore making it not so fun for the little people) going to Klineline pond in Vancouver, lots of parks, and then it all came down to a fusion frenzy of adventure for Isaac’s birthday party.
Isaac’s party deserves a whole entry of its own because of the death spiral of activities that I sent into motion to get ready for it. Early in the week I should have done more planning for it, but I kept putting it off. I picked up a few things here and there but I didn’t do everything I should have. So I was left with making a cake, buying a present for Isaac’s friend who’s party was the day before his party, making light sabers for the boys out of swim noodles, making targets for them to use with the star wars Rebel blasters and clone blasters (AKA fancy Nerf dart guns), blowing up balloons and decorating, and having to go to the school open house to find out who Isaac’s teacher was going to be on Thursday. Isaac’s party was on Friday. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I had left to do and was really tired so I decided to try and take a power nap so I could function better afterwards. I started my nap and who shows up but the yard dudes who thatch and aerate. I was too brain dead to realize that I needed to go tell them to come back another day so I just slept on through the noise of the machines doing work in my yard. I completely forgot that thatching produces tons of yard waste that looks like hay scattered everywhere and is very dirty and takes forever to clean up. So I woke up Thursday afternoon to a nightmare of yard gunk everywhere and realizing that I now had hours of yard clean-up to do before I could have Isaac’s party the next morning out in our back yard. It was an awful realization. To make it worse, I had promised Micah that after my nap we could set up the bounce house in the yard so he could jump for a bit. But with all the thatch everywhere, I couldn’t put it up. He was reduced to a ball of tears for hours because I couldn’t set up the bounce house.
For those of you out there who think I rented a bounce house for my sons birthday, just know that i didn’t. My tastes aren’t that extravagant for kids parties. I am a cheapskate through and through. i have done parties at home because they are cheaper. My friend Vicky bought it a few years back for an insanely cheap price for a birthday party for her boys and she lets me borrow it. It only hold 3 kids at a time and still takes up half of my yard, but is tons of fun.
It was too hot to go out and clean up the mess before I had to go pick up Isaac from Antone’s birthday party so I worked on other party stuff, knowing that I wasn’t going to have time to clean up the yard until after the school open house, which got over at 8. Let’s just say I was feeling very bleak… and Bryan had to give blood that night at the church and so he would be too weak to help …. plus he was going to go buy one more birthday present for Isaac while I was gone…. the death spiral of events continues…
After the open house it was almost dark so I sent Isaac in with the other boys and said “get ready for bed, I have to mow the lawn. “ The lawn mower works really well to suck up all the thatch when you have the bag on. It is almost like a yard vacuum. It takes a while though. I started in the front yard and after an hour I had gone over the yard at least five times with the mower and it looked pretty good, other than being completely thrashed form the de-thatching, and I had filled our 104 gallon yard debris can. The problem now was that I had the back yard to finish and no place to put the yard debris and no light left to do it by.
Luckily, it was garbage night. The garbage man would be by in the morning…. maybe the yard debris guy would come early enough that I could get the can emptied and filled again before the party. I heard the garbage man at 6:30 and was out mowing the lawn not long after and now filling my 64 gallon garbage can with thatch. It filled up pretty quick, darn-it. At 7:15 the yard debris truck came by across the street and was emptying cans. I dragged my cans across the street to beg him to empty my first load of yard debris. He thought I was crazy, he would be around to my side of the street in just a few minutes. I then explained how at 10 30 am 7 boys would show up at my house for a birthday party that was planned for outside and at this point, my yard was buried in thatch and I had no place to put any more of it! I also hoped that I could have the can full again by the time he hit my side of the street because I had a lot of thatch left and didn’t think my one 104 gallon can (a huge beast of a can) could hold it all. Shaking his head, he emptied my cans and marked the extra charge for extra pick-ups on his little paperwork list thing in his truck.
I ran, literally back to the back yard and mowed like a mad women. I filled the can again in about 15 minutes. I think the yard debris guy drove around a different route than normal so that I could have more time to fill my can again. He emptied the big can again (that makes 3 can loads) told me to enjoy my party, and drove off still shaking his head and grinning about what a crazy woman I must be to be out mowing my lawn before 8 am. It took me another hour to finish up and the yard debris can is full once again. So the lawn was clean at 9, but I still had to sweep the patio and set up for the party, and most importantly get a shower. Without lots of details about how that all went, I will just say that because of the lawn, I wasn’t super-prepared and had to give up on some last minute details of the party. I jumped out of the shower just as the first guest came and his mom helped me throw up some streamers and balloons. Boring and minimal, yet gives the essence of festivity.
The party was to be 2 hours long, and we exhausted all my planned activities in the first half hour. Whoops. So we opened presents and this is a huge credit to Isaac’s growing maturity because he let his friends play with the toys he was given. After that I was amazed at how well they all played together, even the boys who didn’t know each other and just sat back and enjoyed it. We ate pizza, cake, ice cream. They played some more in the bounce house, more with the light sabers, more with the toys, and more with dart guns. it went well. It was over before I knew it and I realized I actually enjoyed it. That has never really happened before! I always end up so exhausted after the party is over that I just end up hating the experience. So next time a birthday rolls around, I will be looking up one of those spendy places that does the party for you just so I can rest up and have fun at the party instead of stress the whole time. And if I go for one of those places, then it won’t matter if my yard gets destroyed the afternoon before the event.
Posted by Ily on September 5, 2007 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment
